People who have known me since the 1980s have probably heard my story about the time I bit Frank Stronach. Their curiosity remained dormant until earlier this year, when Stronach, a billionaire and pillar of the Canadian Establishment, was arrested. Thirteen women have now made criminal allegations against him including rape, forcible confinement, and sexual assault. The earliest charge dates back to 1977, the most recent to February 2024.
Canadians were astonished. Stronach is the 92-year-old Austrian-Canadian founder and longtime C.E.O. of Magna International, North America’s largest auto-parts manufacturer. It currently has more than 177,000 employees in 28 countries, including 28,750 in the United States, and, in 2023, revenues of $43 billion.
He used to write a column on economics for Canada’s National Post. He’s been awarded the Order of Canada. The Stronach Group, which he also founded, owns prominent racetracks such as Santa Anita in California, and Gulfstream in Florida, and used to own Pimlico in Maryland. (His daughter, Belinda, now controls the group after a lengthy dynastic feud with her family.) He’s had horses win such major races as the Preakness Stakes and the Breeders’ Cup.
In 1988, Stronach made an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the Canadian Parliament, and in 2012 he founded a namesake political party in Austria. Team Stronach, which was described as right-wing, populist, and Euroskeptic, had endorsements from Bill Clinton and Larry King. But his ambitions were thwarted in 2013, when Team Stronach garnered less than 6 percent of the vote in the national election, earning it just 11 seats in the 183-seat parliament. And so ended Stronach’s experimentation in politics.
In 1985, when I was 17, Magna sponsored me to attend the General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan (now known as Kettering University). It is considered the “West Point of the auto industry.” Stronach had been my final interview for the fellowship.
The following year, I had a chance encounter with him at his company’s annual shareholders meeting in Toronto. Stronach, then a dashing 54-year-old, invited me to attend the corporate after-party. It was held at Rooney’s, a glitzy bar and restaurant that Stronach owned. Not long after he arrived, he spotted me, and I wound up sitting next to him at his large table. Bill Davis, previously the premier of Ontario and a member of the Magna board at the time, sat with us. I kept quiet in an effort not to resemble the awestruck teenager I was.
There was a strange moment when Stronach asked one of his assistants, also seated at the table, if the corporate guesthouse, located a half-hour north of Toronto, was available. He said he was worried about my long drive home. She said it was, but I declined the offer, even when it was made a second time. In those early moments, I considered this to be a sign of a caring C.E.O. What an exceptional show of hospitality, to casually offer a teenage intern a house for the night.
After our entrées, we took a spin on the Rooney’s dance floor, and then Stronach and I found ourselves alone at the table when the waiter asked if we wanted dessert: strawberries in Grand Marnier sauce. I declined, but Stronach accepted, and not long after, he hand-fed me that first strawberry.
I looked around for guidance as he paused the berry in front of my lips, but no one was looking our way as I ate it. When the second berry hovered near my mouth, I became mortified, so I turned to him and said, “Mr. Stronach, if you do that again, I’ll bite you.” It seemed like the sort of thing the plucky heroine of a movie might say. It never occurred to me that it might be a turn-on. A third strawberry appeared, so I ate it quickly, and then I bit him.
What an exceptional show of hospitality, to casually offer a teenage intern a house for the night.
Now, this is where I usually end my tale. Thanks to my sharp teeth and moxie, I had halted the lecherous C.E.O. But that wasn’t how the evening ended.
As if on cue, Stronach’s driver arrived and was told that I’d had too much to drink. Stronach declared that he would take me to the guesthouse, and the driver would deliver my car there. Stronach turned to me and said, “Jane, give him your keys.”
I’d had little wine, but, obediently, I gave them up. As I was walking out of Rooney’s, I realized I’d been set up. I spent 30 minutes in the car as we drove to the remote guesthouse trying to figure out how to get out of this debacle. If I said “no,” would I lose my fellowship? If I said “yes,” would I be labeled a “woman who sleeps with the boss”? Incredulous at the mess I’d gotten myself into, I wound up saying nothing at all.
Perhaps that bite had led Stronach to believe he’d landed a saucy sex kitten, but instead he’d ended up with a confused and frozen teenager. There was a surreal moment when we were together naked in the bedroom where he asked me, “Are you horny?” I’d only ever heard that word spoken by pre-pubescent boys, and the truth could have gotten me into deeper trouble.
Instead, I adopted a posture of passive acquiescence and felt grateful for his efficiency. The sex was perfunctory, and Stronach left not long after we arrived. I made the cold decision to stay in the program and simply avoid him, and it worked. After Magna, I received a fellowship at M.I.T. and never returned to the auto industry.
My own experience was unseemly, but I didn’t know if anything about it was illegal, and that was how I described it to the Peel Regional Police the day after the first batch of sexual-assault charges were announced against Stronach in early June. There are now 18 criminal charges representing the complaints of 13 women.
Any one of those women could just as easily have been me, and, so far, none of the complainants have put their names or faces to a public account of Stronach’s bad behavior, which has led to a fair bit of press interest for me in my native Canada.
Regrettably, these cases often take years to adjudicate. On October 7, the trial was moved from Brampton, a suburb west of Toronto, to Toronto, which has greater resources, and which is where many of the assaults were alleged to have taken place.
Stronach has not been in hiding since the charges were announced, although he has tried his hardest to discuss anything but the alleged sexual assaults, all of which he denies. In early August, he sat for an interview with Mark Kelley of Canada’s investigative-journalism show The Fifth Estate. On August 23, two of his horses, Vitality and Rafaroo, raced in the King’s Plate, the first jewel in the Canadian Triple Crown. (In the interview with Kelley, Stronach talked mostly about an “economic charter of rights” for Canadians, an idea he has spoken about for years. When pressed about the allegations, he claimed that he could prove “those things are lies.”)
In early September, he was interviewed by Christine Van Geyn, the lawyer and host of the show Canadian Justice on the News Forum, a conservative network. On September 10, his horse Vitality won the Prince of Wales Stakes, the second jewel in the Triple Crown. He hosted a large group on September 23 at his restaurant in Aurora, Ontario, where he shared his economic philosophies. And during that period, on September 6, he celebrated his 92nd birthday.
That would be a lot for someone even half his age. He still looks robust and strong, and perhaps that helps explain his most recent alleged assault, in February 2024, at the age of 91.
It might seem odd to still be ruminating about one “bad night,” only it wasn’t just one night. Stronach hadn’t worn a condom. My encounter with him happened at the dawn of the H.I.V. era, and his carelessness led to years of worries about my health.
Stronach, in a 2023 column in the National Post, wrote, “The person who has the gold makes the rules.” What we’re seeing, in the successful prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Nygård, and Harvey Weinstein, coupled with the recent arrests of Sean Combs and Stronach, is while they may have lots of gold, they no longer make all of the rules.
Jane Boon has a Ph.D. in industrial engineering. Her second novel, Bold Strokes, was published in September, and she has also written for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, Time, and McSweeney’s
